Truth: Giftedness and ADHD can look a lot alike; both may need to be considered for some students. We now know that individuals that fit into these categories not only have their own unique challenges, but they also share many similarities as well. Not only that, but they can occur together.
“Gifted” and “ADHD” used to be consider mutually exclusive, but researchers have realized the two can coexist. And when they do, misdiagnosis often occurs; typically a gifted student is mistakenly identified as ADHD.
Even when academic performance is high, the hidden cost of ADD (ADHD) is often taking a toll. Gifted students with ADD (ADHD) often struggle with anxiety, even when grades are high. They may suffer from boredom when required to do unnecessary, repetitive work that less gifted students may need.
Gifted children suffer when undue expectations exist without consideration of other complex characteristics that define their day-to-day experience. Children identified with ADHD become deficit-focused when their strengths are neither recognized nor celebrated.
Psychomotor Overexcitabilities And ADHD
The difference between ADHD and psychomotor overexcitabilities is that a child with ADHD needs to move and fidget constantly, while a gifted child with overexcitabilities does it more with purpose.
Studies have shown that 50% of kids who are gifted have ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. But that doesn't mean that 50% of people who have ADHD are Gifted.
However, there is no correlation between this condition and intelligence. In fact, according to one study , ADHD affects people in the same way across high, average, and low IQ score ranges. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that can make it difficult for people to focus and to control impulsive behaviors.
I want to emphasize that giftedness is one form of neurodiversity, and it is not exclusive. Many people have giftedness as one part of their neurodiversity experience, and they may also have other kinds of diagnoses, for example ADHD.
Signs of giftedness can appear as early as infancy and continue during the toddler and preschool years. Testing for giftedness and high IQ, however, usually takes place around age 5.
Misdiagnosis is not uncommon when high IQ and ADHD collide. Very bright children who are also highly active are sometimes misdiagnosed with ADHD. On the other hand, some highly intelligent children with ADHD can focus on things that interest them for an extended period of time, which can lead to misdiagnosis as well.
The stereotypical hallmarks of ADHD — inattention, poor executive functions, behavioral problems, and more — could actually be symptoms of learning disability like dyslexia or another related comorbid condition.
Hyperfocus and esoteric interests can be a problem.
Gifted students often have intense focus on things of interest to them to the exclusion of all other things that other people find of value (like eating, sleeping, and personal hygiene). This is common in people with ADHD (called “hyperfocus”).
According to clinical records, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and learning disabilities are the three diagnoses most often reported in comorbidity with giftedness [9, 10].
High IQ may “mask” the diagnosis of ADHD by compensating for deficits in executive functions in treatment-naïve adults with ADHD.
However, empirical research has not demonstrated that anxiety is a greater problem for gifted children than it is for children who are not gifted. In fact, there is empirical evidence that intellectually or academically gifted children experience lower levels of anxiety than their nongifted peers.
Both giftedness and autism fall on a spectrum, so while there may be individuals who clearly fit into one box or another, some behaviors might be more ambiguous and require additional information, context, or professional opinions.
Some studies showed that gifted children had lower anxiety scores than their non-gifted peers (15,16). For example, Guignard et al., (9) reported that gifted children display higher anxiety only when they did not have more perfectionism than their peers.
For instance, among the 18 studies under scrutiny that did not explicitly state an IQ cut-off point the mean range of IQ among individuals with ADHD reported in the studies is from 102 to 110. Given that lower IQ is associated with ADHD this suggests that individuals with ADHD may be inaccurately represented.
Executive functions have other roles which affect how someone thinks. In people with ADHD, these executive dysfunctions impact thinking in numerous ways. People with ADHD don't really think faster than people without it, but it can sometimes seem like they do. People with ADHD do think differently though, in a sense.
At Work or School
Research has found that people with ADHD have more creativity and idea generation than people without the disorder. 3 This can lead to outside-the-box thinking that is so important for innovation. Hyper-focus: Many people with ADHD become hyper-focused on things that interest them.
However, there is another reason to lower the IQ cutoff for giftedness below 130. For example, the most widely used studies on gifted education identify gifted scores in the range of 115–129 IQ points for students who are non-native English speakers or come from low-education families (e.g., Crabtree et al. 2019).
It may depend where you live. While we like to think everyone is special, some people have extraordinary abilities — intellectual, artistic, social, or athletic. Many experts believe only 3 to 5 percent of the population is gifted, though some estimates reach 20 percent.
Hyperactive is a word often used to describe gifted children as well as children with ADHD. As with attention span, children with ADHD have a high activity level, but this activity level is often found across situations (Barkley, 1990). A large proportion of gifted children are highly active too.